Tag: Plato

  • Plato’s Phaedrus and the Paideia of Søren Kierkegaard

    In the summer of 2022, a friend invited me to join a discussion group which gets its jollies reading and discussing Plato’s dialogues line by line in minute detail. Before long it became obvious to me that I had entered the gates of heaven though I was much more alive than dead. Old pockets of gray matter long dormant, but still harboring vestigial memories of Attic Greek, learned in college a long time ago, and Hellenic culture, shrouded in darkness, received light. That should have been sufficient for any philosophical junkie.

    But gluttony overcame me and I talked myself into joining a second discussion group on reviewing, also with tedious devotion, the complete works of Søren Kierkegaard. Both discussion groups came to me through the medium of Meetup.com under the auspices of The Chicago Philosophy Meetup. The Chicago Philosophy Meetup is what you call an “enabler”.

    Reading Kierkegaard’s works, which tend to drip with irony, refer to theological and philosophical figures and concepts only obliquely, and take pseudonymous inscriptions, I was while very much intrigued also very much overwhelmed. An oppressive cloud of ignorance hovered over me, as I tuned in on our weekly discussion of Kierkegaard parked on a street in Chicago on a fine autumnal evening, idly researching an influence on K.— it was Herder or Hamman or some “H” name—when I serendipitously came upon a course offering “Søren Kierkegaard – Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity” taught by Professor Jon Stewart—auspiciously out of the University of Copenhagen—that started that same day.

    That was all the serendipity I needed. Or so I thought. Unbeknownst to me at the time. Professor Stewart’s schtick concentrates on demonstrating Kierkegaard’s indebtedness to Socrates (the other guy I had been trying to “get my mind around”).

    By this “chance” moment, I was afforded the means to get Kierkegaard better by getting Socrates better and vice-versa.

    Flash forward to early April in 2023, I was dreading the task of writing an essay for my final assignment in the Kierkegaard course, while we completing a reading of the Phaedrus dialogue with my Plato meetup group. Clearly, fate ordained that I combine the Phaedrus into the paper, the necessity of which became abundantly clear as reacher lead me to discover more and more reasons to emphasize the significance of the Phaedrus for better appreciating Kierkegaard.

    I now have serendipitous whiplash.

    Here is the most recent draft of the essay, which I seek to improve and is open to your suggestions.

  • The Perils of the Socratic Method in Modern Times

    Socrates

    When I went to a small liberal arts college, Marlboro College, in southern Vermont in the eighties, a “Great Books” program and various other study choices immersed me in the Socratic method more so than I had ever realized. In fact only recently, over forty years later, taking a massively open online course (MOOC) on Søren Kierkegaard, much to remind me how invested I was in his method, habit of challenging conventional wisdom, the status quo, and established opinion.

    For example, I read Nietzsche way back then and remembered and believed ever since in his declaration that “It’s not a matter of having the strength of one’s convictions, but the courage to attack one’s convections.” How Socratic is that? It became one of my mottos.

    But in my long career as an engineer in the technology sector, it made me a little bit weird and suspicious to my colleagues. It made me willing to reverse my position or “nominal” opinion on a dime, sometimes in the middle of a meeting. For some, I imagine, it made me look uncertain (I was) and wishy-washy. Like Socrates, I didn’t always put much stock in defending a point of view. I preferred to challenge points of view. It was my brand of what Hegel and Kierkegaard recognized as “negativity”.

    Needless to say that “negativity” however well intended didn’t and doesn’t go over well in a corporate environment or in modern, American business culture. It is an instinct I am proud of and suffer from simultaneously. The seductive properties of the Socratic Method need to be approached with caution (if by then it is not too late :-)).